At E3 last month, Microsoft announced that they were adding a handful of new options to their already impressive custom design controller website/service including new colors(Mineral Blue, Sierra Brown and Ink Blue), metallic finished and rubberized grips(extra charge). Up until recently I had played with the Xbox Design Labs website a little here and there late last year with the intention of building the perfect controller for my 8yr old daughter. I just never got around to ordering/pulling the trigger on it but I’m actually quite happy I held off.

Recently I was provided with some credit to be used with the design, order and delivery of a controller and was it ever fun. The only problem is it’s so time consuming and fun experimenting with the with all the options. After a solid hour of playing and testing colors – I decided I needed a source of inspiration. So I looked no further than my favorite comic book character. Superman. And I came up with a few designs but this one I liked the best. The colors in the immediate image look a little off like pink and a dusty purple but I assure you that it was very much Blue and red as you can see from the 2nd image. You can see that the front is blue with the yellow D-Pad and red thumb sticks to represent the shield on his chest and the bumpers/triggers are red on the back to better represent his iconic cape.

I then was thinking about it and thought that some of these colors would go really well together in an inspiration for my favorite comic book villain, the Joker so I set out to make that happen and I think I did a pretty admirable job. 

I then went on to make 5 or 6 other designs all inspired by some of my favorite movies/comic book characters and then before I knew it. I had blown through another 2 hours. I finally decided placed my order seamlessly and was immediately greeted by an email notification stating it would be delivered in 7-10 days. That was less than 1 week ago and not 10 minutes ago… it arrived and I think it really looks sharp. I feel like I captured the essence of what I was going for. In retrospect I should have gone with the hard bright green because(I was more targeting the look of his suit as opposed to the hair) the Aquamarine is a shade bluer than I had anticipated but I’m not at all disappointed. I love it. The rubberized grip feels great and adds a real premium quality feel to the controller and the metallic finishes on the D-Pad and triggers looks outstanding.

Well done MS and thank you.

J